It is the habit (well known to psychologists) of transferring to anything created by our own skill, or which reflects our own skill, as if it lay causatively and objectively [3] in the reflecting thing itself, that pleasurable power which in very truth belongs subjectively [3] to the mind of him who surveys it, from conscious success in the exercise of his own energies.

Their magic was causatively of no virtue at all, but, being believed in, through this belief it became the occasional means of exciting the imagination of its victims; after which the consequences were the same as if the magic had acted physically according to its pretences.